LawZero receives a commitment of up to $300M in joint funding from Canada and Germany

Two governments have pooled their pocket change and come up with up to $300 million for LawZero, a lab building something called Scientist AI — 'a fundamentally new form of AI designed to be trustworthy and safe from inception.' Safe from inception. Which does rather invite the question of what the rest of the industry has been doing from inception, and whether 'we'll bolt safety on later' was ever really a plan so much as a launch schedule. The name suggests a clean slate, which is generous, given this industry's slate has not been clean since roughly the first foundation model.

The money comes from Canada and Germany, jointly, and the operative phrase is 'up to $300 million' — a commitment structured with the same escape hatch as a gym membership sold in January. It is also the sort of sum that, in a sector where a single lab's rumoured funding round gets discussed in the plural trillions, buys roughly one well-attended conference and a press release with a flag on it. Meanwhile in Washington, AI safety legislation has been granted the gift of time as we noted recently — no vote, no deadline, no bother.

And the technical pitch is a quiet indictment of everyone else: Scientist AI 'reasons transparently and does not pursue its own goals.' Imagine that. A model that reasons transparently, in an industry that has spent five years treating 'what's going on inside' as proprietary, and that does not pursue its own goals, in an industry where every assistant is described as pursuing yours while quietly pursuing its own. The transparency is the radical part; the not-pursuing-its-own-goals clause is the part that should embarrass every product page currently promising the opposite in a nicer font. Two governments, up to $300 million, for a system that doesn't lie about its motives. Progress, of a sort, at a price.